Find out how much different mortgage lenders will let you borrow: New calculator reveals how home loan offers can vary by £150k

Ever been confused by the dark arts of mortgage brokers who seem to know which lenders will lend less and who will lend more?

Despite all the talk of tightened lending criteria over the last few years and househunters getting no more than 4.5 times their salary as a home loan, it still seems lenders have very different approaches - and it's only mortgage brokers who can divine the size of loan we will get.

One online broker has afforded borrowers some much-deserved transparency with a new mortgage calculator that reveals, after the user has plugged in their specifics, how much different banks and building societies will be prepared to lend.

Traditional mortgage calculators do a simple income multiple calculation

And for one borrower (see case study below) the discrepancy between the most and least generous turned out to be £150,000.

Dwell is one of a few recently launched online mortgage brokers but the only one so far to offer this particular tool. At the moment it only compares the top 10 mortgage lenders, but it takes two minutes to get an accurate idea of how much you personally could borrow from the likes of Halifax, NatWest, Barclays, Santander or Nationwide.

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Instead of giving you an estimate like other calculators, Dwell's system updates in real time using data provided by these 10 lenders.

This includes detailed criteria such as how they calculate self-employed income or whether they will lend if you've got a black mark on your credit profile, for example.

Each lender has a different attitude to risk and will lend people very different amounts. This is a huge issue as it can lead to people missing out on the properties they hope for.

The tool also sets Dwell apart from the other two online brokers - Trussle and Habito - which allow you to apply for a mortgage online and then suggest the best mortgage product for you. At this stage you are then passed over to a real person who gives you mortgage advice over the phone.

Dwell's application process is similar to this and includes advice from a human being, but its calculator shows you the range of offers available to you before you apply.

The firm's chief executive Pradeep Raman says: 'What often isn’t explained and certainly isn’t clear to many mortgage applicants is that each lender has a different attitude to risk and will lend people very different amounts.

'This is a huge issue as it can lead to people missing out on the properties they hope for.'

Why do other calculators not work like this?

Mortgage lenders used to work out how much you could borrow based on a multiple of your annual income, with about four or five times that being pretty typical.

But new rules brought in during 2014 banned that simple calculation and instead force lenders to base the amount you can borrow on what you can 'afford' - loosely, your income minus your expenses each month leaving room to cover your mortgage repayment.

There is no hard and fast rule on how this calculation is made by lenders though - with the result that, according to Dwell, the difference between the highest and lowest amount can be more than £150,000.

Dwell's mortgage calculator reveals just how much different banks vary their mortgage offers

The firm gives the example of Alex and Fatima, a couple who found it difficult to work out how much they could borrow to buy their first property because Alex is self-employed and Fatima has a car loan.

Alex pays himself a small salary and dividends of £16,000 a year while leaving roughly £50,000 in the company as operating profit before tax over the past three years. Fatima earns £35,000 a year and is committed to paying £200 each month towards her car finance loan.

Using the calculator they found that Woolwich from Barclays will lend them a joint mortgage of £415,000 - a whopping £188,100 more than the loan RBS is prepared to offer the couple at just £226,900.

This doesn't mean that Barclays will lend the most to everyone - it simply seems that Barclays' lending criteria favour their particular circumstances.

Where one lender might like customers with full-time employed salaries and no credit card debt, others are more concerned about your age and how long you want to repay the mortgage over.

The calculator also trumps the traditional comparison sites which rank deals based on how cheap the rate is and whether they have a commercial arrangement that sees them paid a commission by the lenders they feature.

Additionally, the deals pulled up when you search for a mortgage using a price comparison website are only the advertised rates and products - you might find that you don't qualify for them at all.

Steve Tigar, chief executive of Money Dashboard - one of This is Money's top 10 financial apps - used the Dwell service to organise his first mortgage this month after struggling to get anywhere with price comparison sites.

'I think they are terrible, a complete waste of time,' he says. 'There is not a modicum of personalisation to the search results and typically you get punted through to a single broker who doesn't bother to follow up once you fire over your enquiry.'

A word of warning to those looking to do the whole thing online however - mortgage lenders themselves still haven't caught up with technology so no matter how whizzy the search and communication functions with your broker are, you'll probably still be required to deal with piles of paper.

'Despite Dwell using some pretty smart tech, the lenders still require an inordinate amount of paperwork,' says Steve. 'It was a genuine headache trying to pull together months of bank statements as I haven't received paper bank statements for over a decade.'

DOING THE MORTGAGE ONLINE

Steve (34) with his wife Lyndsey and daughters Emily and Katie

Steve Tigar used Dwell to arrange his mortgage recently and said the experience was 'outstanding'.

My family moved to Edinburgh five years ago and we have all fallen in love with the city. It felt like the right time to settle down and buy a family home. We've been saving for quite some time and had a rough idea of what we could afford. We weren't sure, however, which lender would be right for us and the Dwell service looked fascinating.

They promised to find relevant products quickly, which is exactly what we were looking for. And they weren't charging a fee either which was appealing giving the extortionate transaction costs involved in purchasing a property.

They combine the latest technology with human expertise to deliver a really outstanding service. There were quite a few moving parts during the transaction, so it was great to be able to fire over WhatsApp messages to the Dwell team that were actioned very quickly, which saved me the hassle of calling or popping into a broker's office.

We knew we could get a larger mortgage, but we didn't want to over extend ourselves, so we decided not to allow ourselves to be tempted by that and instead chose to take the Barclays Springboard mortgage. It was an attractive rate for a low deposit, allowing us to deploy our savings on home improvements.

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